Silence is temporary. Noise creeps in. And within the noisiness of our lives are the voices and words of family. Of friends. Of community. And as I walk in those woods, I can hear those holy words interrupt the silence.

Just as Jesus interceded on our behalf, he is promising that the Spirit will hear our intercessions. Just as Jesus pleaded on behalf of his disciples to the Father, so too will the Spirit. The Spirit is not less than for the Spirit is still God.

Nothing is proven. Nothing is set in stone. Yet we are a resurrection people, we believe in miracles and our faith tells us that all we have seen in this world, shows us there is something more.

Yes, there is work to be done and some of that work may hurt but we shall never be the cause of pain or suffering or sorrow. No, when faced with such things we shall be strong, for Christ was strong. We shall be graceful for Christ was full of grace. We shall carry with us that lesson for we are strong in our faith.

We receive the blessing of God because we have faith even though we have not seen. And that blessing is confirmation of God’s love for all of us. That blessing is Christ’s love; our faith is a blessing received, a confirmation of God’s real presence in all our lives.

The light of God is upon us and we sometimes need each other to witness it. We sometimes need each other to witness it. And we sometimes need to sit ourselves in a quiet place, weep, and in our faith know that the light shall return. In our darkness, faith promises light.

It is the God of the early morning who helps us greet the day, the day being a continuation of everything that Jesus changed when he rose from the dead.

In the sunrise we witness the continuity of God who was with us in the night, when we dreamed of an earth without hunger, a people thirsting only for God’s love.

In the sunrise we walk with God as we do the work to remove hunger and sate the thirst of a people looking to be loved.

And yet, alas, I do not understand why all of this happened and could not have been avoided. Why scripture had to be fulfilled. Why our savior died hanging on a cross before the weeping eyes of his mother.

Why did this happen?

What is to happen will happen soon, the betrayer has already left the upper room. What is to happen will happen soon, but not yet. What we have now is our messiah teaching about holiness through service and through that service, sacrifice. And on this night, when all of those things that are going to happen, begin to happen, we know just what that sacrifice means. So many of the disciples would lay down their lives for each other, for their beliefs, for their faith. And why they did can be found in Christ’s example given on this night even before his execution.

I wonder if we can see this as it is. This is Jesus offering himself to the blind man without regard for sin or belief. Jesus offered himself regardless. Jesus offers himself now regardless. We do not need to be of a particular branch or sect, we do not need to believe even, for Jesus offers himself for all peoples. Over and over again, Jesus enters into our lives and works to heal us from sin and infirmity.

There is so much to this story. The history. The provenance. A Jewish man speaking to a Samaritan woman. That Samaritan woman becoming an evangelist. The turned hearts and minds of a community. And the fact that community invited Jesus in. No individual thing in this story stands alone.

There is difficulty within faith, there are struggles on our faith journeys. We may even run from our faith, but the constancy of God’s love remains.

What Jesus is warning us away from is ensuring that our prayer is not performative, that we do not render our clothes and beat our chests calling to God without action, without belief. And to do so, we need discipline and not performance.

We need to judge rightly our misdeeds and atone for them; ask God for forgiveness so that we might realize God’s love with a clear heart and clear mind.

These ashes, symbolic perhaps, still mean more than the flailing of a hypocrite wishing to be seen.

Perhaps we will never witness such beauty for ourselves. Perhaps that is our reality.

Perhaps though in our imaginings and perhaps in our faith and perhaps in moments of absolute harmony where things are just so, morning light filtered through a lace curtain creating designs and imagery dancing in a breeze, a moment we wish to keep in stasis forever, we can understand the awe those disciples must have felt.

From that suffering, from those bad feelings felt, comes change when we turn and remain focused on the one who brings the soothing thoughts of spring, the one who looked through death and received his resurrected son in the heavenly kingdom to which we all aspire.

This is not hope or folly. This is not wait and see. This is immediacy.

In this moment, in all your life that is off, in tears and in loneliness and in silence and in persecutions, you are blessed.

So, this is where we encounter the both/and of St. Teresa’s poem for we should both act as Jesus did, we should serve as Christ’s hands and feet in the world, and (AND) understand that we are not Jesus.

We are limited by our humanness without divinity while at the same time we experience the boundless unlimitedness provided to us through our faith in Jesus.

I like to think that we celebrate the baptism of our Lord for the special thing it is on its own as a celebration of God’s humanness coming to be with us and to be washed with us and share in our righteousness.

I hope too we celebrate this baptism as a connection, a direct connection between not just God and us, but with Christ as well.

We are but the shepherds receiving the good news, we are but the shepherds passing on the good news to others for we have found salvation.

For the Lord saves us all.

On this morning, in this chilly air and under bright skies, Jesus is born of Bethlehem. In John’s version we do not hear of Jesus’ birth, his time as an infant. Instead, we are given the gift of knowing Jesus has been with us all along.